


On the care of watchmen: in wolf's clothing

by Demmora



Series: On the care of watchmen [1]
Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: Carrot caring for Angua, F/M, some mention of violent crime
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-26
Updated: 2016-02-26
Packaged: 2018-05-23 10:03:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,083
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6113080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Demmora/pseuds/Demmora
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Someone requested an angsty fic for Carrot and Angua, so I've written angsty-fluff because I can't end on a note of suffering. Especially not for these two whose private interactions we saw so little of in the DW novels. </p><p>Summary: Angua comes home after several hard days at work and to add insult the injury discovers she has fleas. Carrot has decided to help her, seemingly whether she wants help or not.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On the care of watchmen: in wolf's clothing

“You don’t have to do this, you know.” Angua commented, standing hesitantly in the entryway to their shared bedsit.

Carrot, stooped over the hearth with the iron poker in hand, gave a gentle shrug, his massive shoulders rolling easily. It was a hot day outside, but he’d stoked the fire up until the room had the same consistency of a sauna. “I know.”

“I mean you _really_ don’t have to, Carrot.” Angua tried again, a hint of desperation eking into her voice. She tried not to think of it as a whine—she already felt like running away with her tail between her legs. Literally.

“It’s no trouble,” Carrot replied cheerfully, straightening up to retrieve the kettle from the top of the cast iron stove before the gentle whistle of steam could turn into a shriek, and gently pouring the contents into the bathtub which had been pulled down from behind the door. Old towels were spread out on the floor around it, and their kitchen table—their only table—had been folded down and shunted against the wall to make room for the tub, which was now full enough to lie down in comfortably. Or stand—if you had four legs rather than two.

Angua watched as he secured his rolled up sleeves above his elbow, and tested the water with the crook of his arm.

“Shouldn’t be too hot for you,” he supplied helpfully, fixing her with that gentle, honest smile of his, “But you might want to test it first.”

Wrapped only in a towel, her uniform discarded at the bottom of the stairs to be boiled—or possibly burned— later, Angua looked down at her bare toes and sighed. Her feet and legs were riddled with red bite marks, and where she hadn’t been bitten her skin was raised in angry welts from scratching. She’d always been meticulous about hygiene, even before she’d moved to Ankh-Morpork and discovered that to many, the concept of personal hygiene had remained purely conceptual. She’d always been careful to wash and scrub her own small room regularly, and her baskets were always replaced before they started to smell too lived in. No one liked the smell of wet dog after all, not even if they spent half their life on all fours with their nose to the ground. And she’d always made sure to have a stash of flea powder at hand. It had always seemed to work well, up until now. Then again she’d never gone rooting through junk and scrap piles of the Mires down in the Shades before either. She’d come out black, fur matted and smelling of things that made wet dog comparable to a mountain air breeze in spring. But she’d found the murder weapon, and been able to trace the culprit to his hideout on Toppledown Lane. She thought she’d find some small satisfaction in watching the man dangle from the gallows this morning, the certainty of a job well done. But there was little contentment to be had when there were three tiny graves in the cemetery of the Small Gods, marked by fresh dirt and toy animals left to lean forlornly against headstones. Angua shuddered, trying to push the memory away, even though she knew she’d always remember the look on the mother’s face when she’d opened the door and found Angua standing there, helmet under her arm. Absently she scratched at her wrist, focusing on the incessant itching all over her skin, nails digging in hard enough to draw blood.

“I wish you’d stop doing that,” Carrot commented lightly, still standing by the bathtub, a box of shampoo in his hands. It read ‘glossy healthy coat’ in bright red letters. “You’ll only make it worse.”

“I have fleas, Carrot,” she reminded him, somewhat more tartly than she’d intended “Fleas from the _Shades._ It’s like being bitten by crawly things with metal dentures. It can’t get much worse.”

“Then the sooner we get you cleaned up the better.” He replied simply, taking a scoop and measuring out the necessary amount of soap flakes and mixing them into the water. And then because they _were_ fleas from the Shades, added another. “Come on, the water will get cold soon and you know you always feel better after a hot bath.”

“Carrot, does it genuinely not bother you, that you’re about to help me bathe?”

“No?” his handsome face creased in good natured confusion. “Besides, I thought some people thought it was romantic to bathe their partners.”

“Not with flea powder, Carrot.” Angua said, but too tired to be properly exasperated. “And not when one of them is in the shape of a wolf.”

“Well I’m sure there will be other opportunities.”

Angua looked up at him sharply, feeling the heat rise in her cheeks. Carrot simply smiled under her glare, as though he hadn’t just said something, which by Carrot’s standards, was actually rather flirty. She knew he wasn’t as naïve as everyone thought. But it was still hard to pair the meaning behind those words, with his shining innocent face looking back at her. A small part of Angua fought back, and dropped her towel. Carrot, though his ears turned pink, did not look away. Angua was impressed. Even after three years of _courting_ —as he so quaintly wrote to his parents—Carrot was still prone to bouts of ridiculous shyness.

“All right fine.” She said, gesturing for him to turn around. “I need to change.”

Carrot obediently turned and waited patiently for the signal that he could look again.

Somehow the itching was almost worse in wolf form. It took every ounce of Angua’s self-restraint not to sit back and start gnawing and clawing at herself. The smell of the soap powder in the tub too irritated her nose, it was sharp and reeked of lavender. She huffed at him and Carrot, turned to look down at her.

“Let’s get you brushed off first, shall we?” he said, coming over to stoop down beside her, and meticulously combing through her fur, gently lifting her paws to inspect the pads of her feet. The sound she made his hands rubbed over her ears was somewhat embarrassing, not helped at all by the way he smiled and deliberately did it again.

 _Stop that_ , she tried to convey nudging at his hands with her snout and bearing a little more teeth than was polite.

“All right,” Carrot replied, scooping his hands under her and lifting her carefully into the tub.

The smell of lavender was still overpowering, but the water was pleasantly warm and Angua allowed herself to be submerged.

“See,” Carrot said, kneeling down beside the tub and starting to work the suds through her fur with thorough gentleness, “it’s not so bad.”

Angua gave a non-committal growl, and tried to block the smell of the soap out. When his hand came up to cover her eyes, animal instinct made her veer back in alarm, water splashing over the side of the tub.

“Sh,” Carrot soothed, showing her the pitcher in his other hand, and moving in slowly to shield her eyes again “I don’t think you’d want to get this in your eyes.”

Angua relaxed and closed her eyes, feeling the warmth of his palm against her face and the familiar scent of him momentarily eclipsing the floral sharpness. He always smelled the same, like soap, clean sweat and armor polish, but with subtle hints on his skin that told the story of his day. The acidic green tang of black ink on his fingers, the rich ochre of coffee on his lips, and a surprisingly sweet powdery iridescence, no doubt carried with him from the market streets as he walked among the stalls and shopfronts and stopped to speak to everyone he met. It was the scent of everyone whose life he had ever touched with kindness, and it hung around him in a sparkling haze, just barely there on the peripheral of her senses. And then the reek of lavender filled her nose as water cascaded down her face and the moment was gone.

She sneezed sharply once then twice, resisting the canine part of her brain that demanded she start shaking out her fur.

 _Not in here,_ she told herself, _not in here, not in here, if any of this soap gets on the walls it will probably melt the paint, do **not** shake._

Another wave of water, this time blessedly cool and free of scent—or as free of scent as filtered water from the Ankh ever could be—washed over her. When Carrot pulled his hand away to continue rinsing the rest of her torso with the remaining clean water, Angua looked down into the soapy tub. Despite having bathed several times in the watch house over the last two nights, the water was an alarming shade of yellow. There were also several black specks in the water, and Angua noted that despite some stinging, she was blissfully free of the crawling sensation that had plagued her for the last two days. She sighed in relief.

“All done,” Carrot announced cheerfully, holding a towel out to her face and gently rubbing her head and neck down, “See, I told you it wouldn’t be so bad.”

Angua w _huffed_ at him, and he laughed. It was still strange to know that he could understand her in this form. She knew several other women in the watch who complained that their boyfriends never understood them, and they were speaking the same language. But while Carrot could sometimes be obtuse and overly literal, he always seemed to understand her meaning in wolf form. He always had, even when he’d had problems with interpreting her human tone of voice, he always understood the wolf.

Angua found herself lifted out of the tub in a slough of water, dripping messily onto the toweled floor. She could feel the water weighing her chest fur down, and the need to shake became overwhelming. She turned to Carrot, and began nudging against his legs with urgency.

“I’ll just drain the tub shall I?” he asked mildly, stooping down to grip the handles on either side of the tin tub and lifting it with comparative ease down the few steps out into the yard. Other men might have used the jug to empty some of it down the kitchen sink first, but when you were the size of Carrot there was rarely a need to make such compromises. By the time he returned it was to find Angua standing in front of the fire, a towel wrapped around her torso while she worked fingers through the tangled mess of her hair.

“I really, really, don’t like lavender.” She said aloud, twisting her legs to get a better look at a particularly nasty scratch on the back.

“I think it smells rather nice,” Carrot supplied, stooping down to pick up the old towels strewn about the floor. He hadn’t bothered to bring the tub back inside, no one in their right mind would steal from this street. Not with two known Watchmen in residence. “It reminds me of summer up in the Ramtops.

“Smells like brass polish to me.” Angua sniffed, “Brash polish and flea powder.”

“I suppose it would,” Carrot continued in even tones, bundling up the towels into a haphazard ball and throwing them into a corner to be taken down to the laundry in the morning. “Do you need some salve for those bites? It looks rather painful.”

Angua twisted again, examining the back of her legs. “Do we have any?”

“Yes, I think so.” Carrot replied, reaching up into one of the cupboards that acted as a sort of general medicine cabinet, which of course meant everything fell out when he did. “Here we are,” he said after a moment, pulling out a green tinted jar. “It’s one of Igor’s, works a treat on sunburn.”

“Well it can’t do any harm,” Angua thought about it, “probably. Ah, what are you doing?” she asked, surprised when Carrot had forgone handing her the jar in favor of kneeling down next to her bare legs.

“You can’t see most of these on your own,” he said, unscrewing the lid and dipping a finger inside. “It’ll be easier if you let me.”

“Oh. Well here, give me some and I can do my arms at least,” Angua replied, and Carrot offered up the jar, the contents of which were an alarming shade of green, like arsenic laced jelly. She sniffed it tentatively, and then shrugged, applying some of it to a nasty scratch on her arm. The cooling effect was instant.

When she felt the cooling touch of his hands on her legs Angua stiffened, trying not to flinch away. She looked down at him to find his expression serious as he examined her calves with the same meticulous care he had done the pads of her paws, moving ever upward towards her thighs.

“For what it’s worth,” he said into the silence, apparently oblivious to Angua’s little gasp when he gently pried the towel away and let it drop to the floor, fingers trailing over her inner thighs, ghosting over her backside and up over her hips to the dip in her naval and leaving a cooling trail of balm in his wake. “You’ve been excellent these last few days.”

Angua snorted, “Did Mister Vimes say that?”

“Yes. Well what he said was “thank the gods we have a werewolf” and he’s right. We might not have found him if you hadn’t thought to look in the Mire for the weapon. Everything was pointing us to Butcher’s Row, but you went with your gut and you found him. Well done.”

Angua stiffened, feeling the air cool around her into hard shards of brittle ice, ready to shatter at the merest pressure. “Thank you, but I was just doing my job. Like you.”

Carrot looked up, face still serious. “And some days the job is harder than others.”

“Oh this,” she tried to sound dismissive, “I’ve gotten fleas before Carrot.”

“I don’t mean this. I mean what that man did, and what you found, and how you dealt with it. Mrs. Crowley came by the Watch House while you were… _out._ She wanted to say thank you to Igor for…well…and she wanted to say thank you to you. She saw you at the funeral, you know. I said I’d tell you.”

“I wish you hadn’t.” Angua said tersely, feeling the ice around her beginning to splinter.

“Why?”

“Because no matter what I’ve done now, it doesn’t bring her children back, it doesn’t stop what happened to them, it doesn’t fix _anything_.”

“No.” Carrot agreed solemnly, hands coming to a stop on either side of her waist in a bracing position. When he looked up again there was such a look of unbearable tenderness Angua couldn’t help the sob that escaped the back of her throat. “But you stopped it from happening again. And because of you there's one less person in the world like him.”

 _She’d wanted to tear his throat out, the moment the door had opened and he’d stood up to face her and she’d noticed the iconographs on the wall and the smell of bleach and soap rank in the air, but not as rank as the smell of him, the smell of blood and **satisfaction**_ _turning rancid with fear as she leapt. She’d wanted to rip and tear and howl until the walls fell down around her. And it had been the human part of her brain that wanted it…wolves has no concept of revenge._

“Then why doesn’t it feel right?” Angua demanded, embarrassed to realize she was sobbing, “Why doesn’t it feel like justice?”

“Because sometimes justice is merciful.” Carrot replied, still bracing her, “Sometimes it has to be, to separate us from them.”

One of the other advantages of having a boyfriend the size of Carrot she reflected, in some distant way that was numb from the pain, was that there was so much of him to cling to. When he stood up he lifted her easily, hoisting her legs around his waist and walking them both toward the back room where they shared a bed. When he sat down the springs gave faint protest. This whole room had been gutted earlier too, the floors swept and scrubbed down, the mattress stripped and refilled, the sheets boiled with borax flakes and hung up in the courtyard to dry in the baking summer heat. She’d come home after the execution to find Carrot, fresh off the night-shift, remaking it. It all smelt fresh and clean and Angua realized somewhere in the fog of anguish, like home.

“I wanted to kill him,” she said, words muffled by his chest as large hands held her tightly.

“I know.” Carrot said.

“How can you?” it came out in a wail as she pulled back, eyes searching his face, “How can you possibly know what it’s like to have a monster inside you…”

“I know.“

Angua stopped. It had been said so simply and without emotion that she knew it had to be the truth. Carrot didn't lie, not even the little white lies people used to make each other feel better. It was a simple matter of truth. He said he knew, so he knew.

"There are many people who feel a man such as that didn't deserve a trial, or the mercy of a quick death. And in your situation others might have acted upon that and no one would have blamed them. I saw the crime scene, I'm not even sure I would have held it against you. But the point is you wanted to, and you didn't. That's what makes you different from him. You might have been the one in the room with teeth and claws, but you weren't the monster. Now, lets get your back balmed and we can go get some breakfast, hmm?"

It was an odd little hum, it surpassed the human part of her brain and went to the wolf, it said without actually using words _you will never forget this, you might even wake up some nights years from now and feel the way you do now, but for now it's over, for now you are here and so am I, and everything will be all right_

"Carrot?"

"Yes?"

"Can you do my front as well?"


End file.
